PLIX Spatial Poetry.
Team : Watching-Place with Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX); in collaboration with Hua Xi (MIT Media Lab) and public library professionals
All learning materials for Spatial Poetry are freely available (and remixable) on the PLIX activity repository, here.
With the Public Library Innovation Exchange at the MIT Media Lab, we co-developed PLIX Spatial Poetry: a series of creative learning prompts that encourages individuals to critically examine the way(s) that maps are constructed, and how the places around us got their names. Inspired by the work of Hua Xi—then a graduate student researcher at MIT—and the Data + Feminism Lab, Spatial Poetry encourages exploration, analysis, and reimagination of our communities by taking a closer look at the build landscape around us. Learning prompts explore renaming poems, “found” language poems, place-based performance, and more.
For additional information, you can read a short blogpost we wrote about the development of this project on the Media Lab website. As part of this work, we also worked with a cohort of rural and tribal library professionals, who remixed Spatial Poetry for their settings; more on that process here. Finally, you can learn more about the work of our co-designer, poet Hua Xi, on their website.
Here are some example spatial poems created by librarians from the PLIX community as part of the beta-testing process:
